The Openness Elixir

In the marketplace of ideas, progress depends on freedom—and the expectation of error

Trevor Butterworth

Updated June 19, 2010 12:01 a.m. ET

The word "slick" did not come to mind as Tony Hayward, the embattled chief executive of BP, foundered in a sea of congressional questioning this week. Never in the face of righteous political indignation did expertise look so unconvincing and so unworthy of its status. But in many respects Mr. Hayward and BP were simply unlucky: They were caught out by an event they didn't think would happen and then compounded the problem by sounding clueless when asked to explain what went wrong or how they would fix it.

Excerpt From 'Wrong'

As David H. Freedman notes in "Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us—And How to Know When Not to Trust Them," such cluelessness is all too common in our expert-mediated world. Look at all those economists who failed to predict the great crash of 2008 or the rating agencies whose metrics melted into mere wishful thinking. Realtors, who are supposed to know more than you or I about the housing market, predicted housing prices would trend up for 2008. Experts, schmexperts.

We are, as Mr. Freedman puts it, living in an age of "punctuated wrongness," usually misled, occasionally enlightened. His goal is a broad account of this phenomenon, how it takes shape through specific problems in measurement, how it spreads through the general idiocy of crowds, and how we might identify and avoid it. Bravo!

What emerges from this infernal journey is that there are few incentives in research to acknowledge that error is to be expected and not something to be scorned or obscured. As Robert Boyle, one of the founding fathers of modern science, recognized, experimental error is part of the slow advance toward any scientific truth; you can't have trial without error.

But the current market creates the wrong kinds of incentives for doing good research or admitting failure. Novel ideas and findings are rewarded with grants and publication, which lead to academic prestige and career advancement. Researchers have a vested interest in overstating their findings because certainty is more likely than equivocation to achieve all of the above. Thus the probability increases of producing findings that are false. As the medical mathematician John Ioannidis tells Mr. Freedman: "The facts suggest that for many, if not the majority of fields, the majority of published studies are likely to be wrong."

The problem is that the media tend to validate these findings before they have been properly interpreted, qualified, tested, and either refuted or replicated by other experts. And once a lousy study gets public validation— think of Andrew Wakefield's claim about autism and vaccination—it can prove almost impossible to invalidate.

So far so good, but convention dictates asking what "Wrong" gets wrong. Consider a warning about the unreliability of "surrogate markers"— proxy measurements in the identification and treatment of disease, such as blood-sugar levels for diabetes. Mr. Freedman cites as evidence a 2007 meta-analysis (a synthesis, in this case, of 42 separate studies) that claimed the diabetes drug Avandia caused a 43% increase in heart attacks.

ENLARGE

Illustration by Matt Dorfman

The study sparked panic among diabetics, fury among congressional critics of the Food and Drug Administration, and an inevitable assault on "Big Pharma" in the media. Lost in the din were complaints from biostatisticians and endocrinologists that the study did not call surrogate markers into question, as Mr. Freedman claims, and did not even prove an increased risk of heart attack. This finding was produced by including one study where the drug was contra-indicated for the subjects; take out the study and the 43% disappears.

What, I think, saves Mr. Freedman in this case (and probably others) is his sourcing and his candor. He turns to the right kind of experts to articulate general principles—biostatisticians, for example, who can see deeper than the average scientist into the way the data are gathered, analyzed and screwed up. And in an admirable and disarming appendix titled "Is This Book Wrong?" he notes: "To say that you don't have to worry about my falling for expertise traps because I'm a journalist would be like a mugger offering the reassurance that he's no car thief."

He admits that double-checking his manuscript led to frequent correction and qualification until time ran out and he had to deliver the book to the publisher. He plans on taking one example of being corrected and framing it on his wall so that he can show it to his kids as a cautionary note of the kind his scientist father once showed him.

What makes "Wrong" so right—it being as good as any general account of the fragility of what we take as expert knowledge—is that it raises the right questions. What it doesn't do is try to answer them by articulating a deeper account of what can make knowledge reliable. But this, really, is a matter for scientists, doctors and others to take up: If they cannot formulate robust arguments from their research data—arguments that truly entertain the possibility of being wrong—then they are going to keep inflicting on us error dressed up as insight.

The importance of an open market for research plays a central role in Matt Ridley's "The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves." Mr. Ridley argues that humans have achieved astounding prosperity because ideas "began to meet and mate," collectivizing ingenuity and speeding up progress much like natural selection. The exchange of ideas, he writes, "is to cultural evolution as sex is to biological evolution."

Excerpt From 'The Rational Optimist'

Mr. Ridley proceeds to interrogate history through the evolution of ideas, contrasting, for instance, the economic fortunes of those societies that developed property rights from the bottom up with those that didn't. It is not accidental, he says, that Botswana's indigenous tradition of individual ownership (along with a lucky escape from depredatory colonialism) has helped it to do much better than many of its neighbors in Africa. Rather than deplore the state of Africa as irredeemable, shouldn't we instead encourage the spread of such rights?

Driven by an intelligence that seems to have mated profitably with a wide array of ideas—an intelligence that previously earned him a doctorate in zoology from Oxford and the American editorship of The Economist magazine—Mr. Ridley shows a commitment to rational optimism that will no doubt appall some people as a thought crime against the world's parlous state.

I suspect that if you are the kind of person who is agonizing over when to tell your children that their lives will be cut short by global warming, you will be chilled when Mr. Ridley points out that all the scenarios gamed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that your grandkids will become significantly better off. If you believe that we need more regulation to protect us from the dangers of the world, you will likely scoff at his arguments that the world might be safer with less regulation. And if you revere Bill McKibben or any of the other tribunes of "fashionable pessimism," you'll probably bridle at Mr. Ridley's swift dismissal of their prophecies of the "end of nature" or the "coming anarchy."

What's interesting is the way both "The Rational Optimist" and "Wrong" converge on the idea of openness as fundamental to progress. For Mr. Ridley, the market for ideas needs to be as open as possible in order to breed ingenuity from collaboration; for Mr. Freedman, this market needs to be doggedly open about its errors as a positive step toward reliability. It is only by observing these two principles that an immediate fix and a long-term solution to the catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico will be found.

But is it rational to believe that this sort of openness will expand and prevail? Probably not. I suppose that's precisely what makes both of these books so invigorating.

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